Bayer's neonicotinoid pesticides caused mass bee die-offs — the company launched a fake 'Bee Care' PR campaign to bury the science

When French beekeepers began reporting catastrophic hive losses in the early 1990s, they pointed to a single culprit: Bayer's newly introduced imidacloprid pesticide. The chemical, marketed under the brand name Gaucho, was sprayed on sunflower and corn seeds across the country. Within years, beekeepers watched their colonies collapse by the thousands. The pattern was unmistakable to those in the field, yet the company denied any connection.

Bayer's official position was consistent and unwavering. The pesticide was safe. Independent studies showing harm were flawed. The bee die-offs had other explanations—disease, poor nutrition, beekeeping practices. The company stood by its product and its profits. Imidacloprid became one of the world's most widely used pesticides, part of a broader class of chemicals called neonicotinoids. By the 2000s, the family of chemicals was generating billions in annual revenue.

But documents that would later emerge told a different story. Internal Bayer emails, revealed through regulatory filings and investigations, showed the company understood the stakes of the bee crisis differently than it spoke publicly. The company had launched what it internally labeled the "Bee Care" program—framed to the world as a genuine commitment to bee health and research. In private communications, however, executives celebrated it as a "crisis PR strategy." The program wasn't designed to solve the problem; it was designed to manage the narrative around it.

The lobbying effort was equally deliberate. Industry documents obtained by investigative journalists at The Intercept revealed a coordinated, decade-long campaign to obstruct scientific restrictions on neonicotinoids. Bayer and its peers funded research, shaped policy discussions, and positioned themselves as partners in solving bee decline—all while resisting the one action that independent science increasingly suggested was necessary: removing the chemicals from use.

Europe eventually moved forward despite this pressure. The European Union implemented restrictions on the most widely used neonicotinoids in 2013, making them permanent in 2018. The scientific evidence had accumulated beyond the industry's ability to suppress it. Studies published in peer-reviewed journals documented the pesticides' neurotoxic effects on bee nervous systems, their persistence in soil and water, and their role in colony collapse disorder.